4 ms·

Noone is planning rotating habitats with artificial gravity?

• hinkley 1y ago
  Inyalowda gonna steal to owkwa, sasake?
• hinkley 1y ago
  More seriously though, rotating habs are more difficult to spin properly than Clarke knew. The Russians discovered this and kept it to themselves. https://youtube.com/watch?v=1VPfZ_XzisU https://youtube.com/watch?v=1VPfZ_XzisU I personally like the idea of spinning up large asteroids but the Dzhanibekov Effect will cause a lot of sloshing. If I understand it right, you have to spin them along the long axis, not like O’Neill cylinders. Two separate habitats at opposite ends of an air shaft. Clarke rings have to be careful about docking platforms. In fact they might need an inertially separate structure floating near them to handle loading and unloading of cargo, and then ferry materials back and forth across the “air gap” using very small vessels or robotic arms.
  • m4rtink 1y ago
    IIRC O’Neill cylinders type 3 cylinders were supposed to be built in pairs - even the first picture on the Wikipeda article has them like that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder Wouldn't that cancel out some of these forces ?
    • hinkley 1y ago
      The thought of an entire space station being reliant on none of four bearings three times the size of a football stadium ever needing maintenance and never seizing up is terrifying. You can’t just spin down a station like that for maintenance, can you? I believe technically you’re correct, but practically it’s unworkable.
      • rini17 1y ago
        Noone says it's easy. But at least have inside a small rotating cylinders for 1-2 persons to sleep and exercise in. Should be doable with active stabilization so that it isn't sloshing and not endangering anything if it seizes.
        • hinkley 1y ago
          I'm somewhat fond of the 'bolo' design - several habs cabled together and spun. While the cables are now a new 'single point of failure', Tethers, Inc had (has, as it turns out they have not gone under as I suspected) some pretty compelling ideas of how to avoid that by using a mesh instead of a cable, so micro-meteoroids couldn't sever the cable with one extra-lucky hit.
          • rini17 1y ago
            That has issues with getting in and out. It's possible to solve everyhing, like have a zero-gravity "hub" in the middle, reachable from the habs by lift climbing the ropes. Or have pulleys reconfiguring whole habs as needed. But again anything moving in space and with life support sounds like massive r&d effort.
• avmich 1y ago
  My company recently started working on one.